This blog is about literature, mystical theology,and the instruction of music. It will also discuss other subjects, such as fitness, but it is the first three that I am primarily concerned about, as they are the three great questions of my entire life, starting in childhood. I was quite healthy as a child, but children only think about health when they are sick, and I was not sick very often.

Friday, October 22, 2010

High Noon

Remember the great Jimmy Stewart? A lovely actor, almost in all his roles a figure of habitual kindness, a quality not at all constantly easy to effect. The old Westerns from time to time essayed the quality of profound kindness in the gunslinger, the angel of death, thus making him a figure of God.
"Every man owes God a death, and he who pays this year is quit for the next."
This is bold stuff, of course, like most of Shakespeare, but fairly small potatoes when compared to the greater realities of the greater soldiery of the spiritual life, in which every man - or woman, as we must mention in the omnipresent silliness of an age when it is so hard to find a woman who can actually think in symbols - must know that to spiritually die today is by no means to avoid the same thing again tomorrow. Actually, it was a woman who said this, Saint Jane Francis de Chantal, spiritual daughter of Francis de Sales and founder of an order of nuns, the spirit of whom is very hard to find in so many of today's "ladies of the veil", all so eager to destroy the Church as it used to be known.
But we now have a test case, a turning point. Do the nuns begin to come to their senses, and drop their moronic "inclusiveness", actually effeminacy, or do they, like Charlemagne's troublesome Saxons, get backed into some symbolic river, there either to accept baptism or to be drowned? The Saxons, of course, were soldiers, male to the last, and thus having common sense, saw the light. I'm not sure these truculent babes can do the same.
Yep, I had an encounter this morning, right under the vault of our lovely cathedral, following Father Matthieu's last daily mass in our diocese for at least a month, and it had all the earmarks of a classic exorcism. Oh, no, not the kind of a poor possessed soul that has no free will, no control of its faculties, but the other kind, the more important one that comes from diseased minds defying common sense theology and getting away with it, year after year, decade after decade, until they run into a real theologian, a real prophet, a real vessel of the Seventh Mansion, thus, a real exorcist.
Has the Church ever known so many Jezebels, all running around in civilian clothes and mouthing certain selected phrases from both Scripture and the modern imbeciles who clothe themselves as social scientists? I think not. It's quite a unique phenomenon. An urban myth, a plague all of its own singularity.
And this encounter, because God is immensely fond of anniversaries, happened on the anniversary of John Paul II's elevation to the Papacy. As I used to thump on him, being his spiritual director for an interesting ten years, he must have enjoyed the spectacle of my thumping on the very class of religious sister that gave him heart burn. Happy anniversary, JP.
The difference between being a gunslinger and an exorcist, mind you, is that while the gunslinger, at least according to the novels and the films, walks away blowing the smoke from his gun barrel, the poor old exorcist spends the ensuing hours utterly overwhelmed with some of the purgatory his client is either facing into or has, by the exorcist's efforts, avoided.
The crucifix can never go away, nor can the ordeals of passive prayer, of the dark night, from the contemplative.
And neither can the images of the Gospel. Remember Christ, and His whip in the temple? We might yet have such a thing. John Paul said there could be violence erupt out of fiddling with the liturgy, which includes the words of the Mass, many of which have been corrupted by the feminist whoring of the nuns.
In our parish, however, there has been considerable seduction and corruption of the laity, so any broohaha could be voluminous. I got a hint of this at a recent evening, albeit daily, mass.
But with Father Matthieu off to Rome for a month, we will not be showing up at daily mass. They can putter along without the contemplatives, while the contemplatives return to the cathedral after a five week engagement in Kaslo, for the weekend mass, and take it from there.
Get used to it people, the new translation of the mass is coming, and as the Church never tires of insisting, the liturgy is the ultimate public teacher.
It wasn't actually high noon, being about 9:10 a.m., but certainly the guns were blazing. And I had no idea the incident would take place when I began this post! The Muse is most interesting.